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Drum beats had one thing constant from almost their inception until just a few years ago, and now they don’t.
Of course, I’m speaking about the snare drum.
Mainstay of “holding it down” since almost before drum kits were a thing. If you follow back to its origins, many historians credit Wynonie Harris as one of the earliest precursors. Snare on “2 and 4”.
Follow it earlier than that, to New Orleans. Snare on 2 and 4, with shades of gray, at least with press rolls.
Follow it forward: the rock age. Funk. Reggae. Electronica. Punk. Alternative rock. Modern live arrangements.
All with the snare drum as the centerpiece of the backbeat.
Until now.
I’m not saying the snare will ever go away, but increasingly, drummers are using another device as their “backbeat locus”. The stack.
But wha?
How did this seemingly-very-niche invention, by the great Trevor Lawrence in 2017/18 do what all the other drum inventions failed to do.
That includes tambourines, bells on the drums, bongos on the kick, Zil Bells, gong drums, synth pads, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Nothing doing. The snare still reined supreme.
To understand why the stack is “seeping in” to modern drum beats, in my humble opinion, we need to go back the origin of “beats” as we know them: worship songs in black churches around the turn of the century. And what do we find in recordings from that period? Hand claps.
If we take the paradigm that the snare was a “good enough” replacement for hand claps in music, it all makes sense.
Whatever else you’re doing, you have to have that “2 and 4”.
And nothing really messed with the snare when came to being a decent facsimile of the clap. (We didn’t get good synthesized claps until the early ‘80s. And synth pads are heavy, expensive, delicate to transport, and require a PA/monitor system to use.)
Until Trevor’s invention. Acoustic. Compact. Fits in a cymbal bag. Does not require amplification.
In addition to understanding how/why the stack is slowly competing with the snare for backbeat primacy, we’ll all look at some very specific beats, and ways of using it.
Hope you enjoy!